The manufacturers of high quality, high profile and hence highly priced brand name clothing or textile products are necessarily concerned by the possibility that a counterfeiter can reproduce such products with good or even moderate fidelity and to sell them on the market as genuine, thereby essentially stealing the brand name value from the legitimate manufacturer that the manufacturer has succeeded, as a result of tremendous efforts and expenditures, to build into such products. An equally important concern is, of course, the serious danger that a lower quality counterfeited product might destroy the image and hence the confidence in the genuine product that has also been created, of course, at great expense and effort by the original manufacturer.
Consequently, it has become vitally important to be able to positively identify an original textile product against a counterfeit clone.
The present invention relates to a system and apparatus for the convenient authentication of legitimate and authentic textile products including clothing and the like. A number of features are considered to be essential for an authentication device to be efficient and commercially acceptable for such products. For instance, it is important that the method of identification be simple and, thus, not require in its utilization, highly technical skills and complex technical devices. This is because an inspector must be able to perform the verification task easily away from the manufacturing site, e.g., in the field, often in an adverse environment. Also, for an anti-counterfeit scheme to be effective, each and every one of the authentic product items must carry the identification device. In order to keep the cost of the protective scheme at a reasonable level, it must be possible to attach the identification device to each given product item easily during the normal manufacturing process without disturbing the normal evolution of the latter, preferably without adding any new steps.
It is also important that the identification device be covert so that the counterfeiter will not to be able to locate it, identify it and hence duplicate it with more or less success, thereby creating confusion in the minds of the inspector, and even more importantly in the mind of the purchaser of the product. We will qualify hereafter such covertness as "transparence", meaning that the presence of the device must not perturb or modify in any manner the visual aspect that the product has, before the introduction of the authenticating device. Moreover, considering the fact that certain textile products, such as jeans, trousers, skirts, and other similar clothing products are subjected to a more or less intentionally harsh washing process before they are put on the shelf for selling, in such products, the authentication device must be ingeniously protected in order to survive the obviously abrasive and hence destructive effect of such washes.